RED WATER

A subtle and powerful, if incomplete, indictment of a man and a sect as three wives recall their husband, the Mormon leader executed for his role in the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadow Massacre, where emigrants from Arkansas were murdered by Mormons and their Native American allies.

At times, the numerous evocations of the scenery of the Southwest cloy, but the landscape, austerely beautiful and often merciless, also shapes responses and encourages a toughness of mind and heart, as well as an abiding faith. Beginning in 1877, when the charismatic John Doyle Lee is executed by a firing squad at the site of the massacre, the wives each begin offering up their different takes on Lee. English-born Emma, waiting at a ferry on the Colorado for news of his execution, recalls how she came to Utah and met Lee. Smitten, she readily agreed to marriage, but, as one of his 19 wives, found life in his settlement in southern Utah more difficult than she had expected. Her faith soured when she saw the clothing of the massacred parceled out among the Mormon families and observed the traumatized children who had survived the shootings. Wife Ann, a free spirit, recalls her hard life after she decided to leave Lee and her children to travel, often disguised as a man. She believes him guilty, for as a child she saw him kill an innocent man. Third wife Rachel proudly recalls how she became one of Lee’s earliest conquests and how she accompanied him to prison, believing him innocent. As Emma, still in love with Lee, grieves, she begins to make a new life; Ann continues her wanderings; and Rachel struggles to feed her family in a desert outpost.

A sobering tale of women abused by a man and a faith that demanded total obedience. Still, lacking Lee’s own testimony, the ghastly event is only partially explained. Freeman (A Desert of Pure Feeling, 1996, etc.), a former Mormon herself, has done better.